Junior
faculty members bring home prestigious grants

by Tony Moore

It’s always nice to hear about
someone joining an organization and making his or her mark right away. Maybe
it’s a baseball player hitting a home run in his first game. Maybe a first-term
congresswoman helps pass a groundbreaking bill.

Dickinson’s current roster of
grant, fellowship and award recipients is impressive, and it's also notable for its new impact players—early-career faculty
members who have hit the ground running.

“These grants underline the high
quality of Dickinson’s junior faculty and more,” says Neil Weissman, provost
and dean of the college. “They confirm the college’s competitiveness in the
academic job market when it comes to recruiting. And they validate our
claim that our faculty are excellent in both the classroom and research. We are
a place where the ‘teacher-scholar’ model truly works.”

First up is Assistant Professor
of English Claire Seiler, who recently was awarded two
fellowships: a $40,000 postdoctoral fellowship in poetics at the Fox Center for
Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University and an American Academy of Arts & Sciences fellowship through its Visiting Scholars Program. The latter award provides full-year sabbatical support via a grant amounting to half her salary,
and Seiler will use the fellowship to finish her first book, Midcentury Suspension. The work offers a
new literary history of the decade following World War II that goes beyond the dominant
examinations of modernism and postmodernism. She’ll also begin work on a
new book, which will examine the politics of generational thinking at specific
moments in English-language poetics from 1914 through 2014.

“What links these two projects is
their attention to the inconspicuous terms that govern literary and cultural
criticism,” Seiler says. “ ‘Midcentury’ and ‘generation’ are terms that we
often don’t think too hard about. They seem self-explanatory, but as students who
have taken my Poetry of the Mad Men Era or Generational courses can tell you, such terms often end up
doing our critical thinking for us.”

Alyssa DeBlasio, assistant
professor of Russian, recently received three awards to advance her sabbatical
efforts: from the American Philosophical Society ($6,000), the American Council of Learned Societies
($35,000) and the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh ($50,000). Like Seiler,
DeBlasio is finishing her fourth year at Dickinson and will use the grants to
finish a book, hers on the transition of Russian philosophical thought from the
immediate post-Soviet period (1990s) through the first decade of the Putin era
(2000s). She too will start a new book, which explores the influence of
Soviet philosophy on a new generation of Russian art-house filmmakers.

“Both of these projects bridge my
three academic loves—Russia, philosophy and film,” she says. “And thanks to the
grants I received, I'm now in the very lucky position of having the flexibility
to travel to Moscow for archival research next year, if that's where my new
project takes me.”

Finally, Assistant Professor of
Chemistry Rebecca Connor (pictured above with student researcher Myungsun Shin '14) rounds out the group, receiving a Single-Investigator Cottrell
College Science Award from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement.
The Cottrell is an early-career grant aimed at helping faculty
members launch “active research programs targeting complex scientific problems.”
The award encourages collaborative work with undergraduate researchers,
and Connor, who is in her fourth year at Dickinson, will use the $35,000 grant
toward a summer student-faculty research project called Investigation of the Effects
of Parthenolide on the Heat Shock Response System.

"This award will enable me to work with undergraduates in my
research lab for the next two summers and will allow us to extend my research into
different aspects of the toxicology of potential chemotherapeutic natural
products," Connor says. "We will be studying how such natural products impact stress response
systems in cancer cells."